This invention relates to data synchronization for mobile devices. Mobile devices, such as cellular telephones are getting increasingly advanced. Recently, so-called smartphones, such as the iPhone by Apple Computers and the BlackBerry by RIM have become increasingly popular. In contrast to a conventional cellular telephone, smartphones typically offer advanced capabilities beyond the capabilities of a typical cellular phone, often with a PC-like functionality. For example, most smartphones support full featured email capabilities with the functionality of a complete personal organizer. Other types of functionality can include an additional interface, such as a miniature QWERTY keyboard, a touch screen, a built-in camera, contact management, navigation hardware and software, the ability to read business documents of various formats (e.g. PDF and Microsoft Office files), Internet browsers, music players, and so on.
For e-mail applications, many of the smartphones use a push-based e-mail approach. There are many ways in which push-based email can be realized, but essentially push-based email works as follows. When an email comes in to the server hosting the user's email account, the server sends out a message (e.g., a text message) to the smartphone or mobile device associated with the email account, telling the smartphone that the smartphone needs to synchronize with the server. The smartphone then initiates a synchronization process with the server and downloads any new emails for the user to the smartphone. In other solutions, the email itself is simply pushed to the recipient, rather than pushing a notification.
When sending an email that the user composes on the smartphone, the smartphone connects to the mail server and transfers the email to the mail server, which in turn sends out the email to the appropriate recipient. Often, when the user sends an email using a smartphone, he wishes to attach a file to the e-mail. In current systems, any attachments for an email must reside either on the mail server, or on the smartphone itself. This could be a problem, for example, if the user wishes to send an attachment that resides on the user's laptop hard drive. In such a situation, the user does not have any visibility to reference their laptop hard drive from the smartphone. Thus, there is a need for improved mechanisms for email use of smartphones and similar mobile devices.